They chose to watch Fox News. They were already liking what they saw.
Sounds like getting advertisers back is like fighting ignorance - taking longer than he thought.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
You can if enough people have been lured down the rabbit hole. Here in 2023 maybe enough have been lured. As long as these rabbit holes are attracting some people, and almost no one escapes later except by eventually dying, they’ll keep growing. And growing, and growing and … .
The key thing with a brainwashing campaign is to have a gentle on-ramp until you get folks hooked. Then crank the wacko-level until they’re utterly isolated in your silo. It’s Cult Recruitment 101.
Something like 90% of pre-Musk twitter users never posted; they simply subscribed and read content. Twitter was almost as top-down as Faux News. The difference is there were many tops, and not all of those tops were RW wacko.
Musk is now driving out all the non-wacko tops and adjusting the algorithms to feed wacko starter drugs to the entire audience. Some of whom are take-charge people and will be repulsed and switch off. But many others will passively “watch whatever’s on TV” until they’re sucked in.
Given the way US voting works, local majorities in a minority of jurisdictions can produce state- and federal- level majority rule for the minority party. And often does. The RW wacko faction is pushing that advantage hard. They can rule almost perpetually as a minority party if they can get the right numbers in the fairly few right places even without any illegal skullduggery. Once skullduggery is added in, it’s Katy bar the door!
Musk is totally pushing in that direction, albeit for reasons of his own, not any fealty to the Republican party as an organization.
See I think he does understand, he was just never interested in maintaining that business model. Twitter was an ad sales company, but being in ad sales means kissing up to advertisers who have, in Elon’s view, all been infected by the Woke Mind Virus.
For as many stupid decisions that Elon’s made in the last year, I think he knew from the get go that 1) fighting the woke mind virus would result in drastically decreased ad revenues, 2) dealing with decreased revenue would require drastically cutting costs, and 3) slashing the workforce and shutting down data centers were the best ways to cut costs.
We can all agree, I’m sure, that voluntarily tanking your own company’s revenue to fight a culture war is stupid. But given that’s the premise he started with, the rest follows. And now he’s trying to create an alternate revenue source based on subscriptions, a model that rarely ever works. XBox Live and Amazon Prime are only a couple examples I can think of of the sort, and neither of those are granting access to a social network.
I don’t buy much of that
Musk is convinced of his own genius. I’m sure there’s a part (maybe a large part) of his mind that thought his natural genius and ability to cut through BS would be refreshing to companies tired of being ‘woke’ and lead to large profits
I’m also pretty sure he really did think slashing the workforce was purely a cost cutting figure and that, again, his natural genius would cut through to the 10% (or whatever small fraction) he believes actually contributes
We have several election cycles in a row where it is clear that Twitter/X likes and engagement did not translate into electoral success. Remember all of the “Red Wave” talk before the 2022 elections? Constantly talked about on social media, regular media, feeding each other. And yet, what happened? Nothing like what was predicted on Twitter RW circles. Independent and moderate voters are moving away from the extreme right. Look at polling on Ukraine/Russia. The extreme right says the country is split, but the reality it is the right which is split. The left, the middle, independents are all largely in agreement, whereas the right is split about 50/50. The extreme right is also throwing anyone that isn’t extreme out of the party as RINOs. They are distilling themselves down to the most noxious and extreme. This is generally how cults go. Also look at special election results since 2022. Democrats are running 10 points ahead of the typical partisan lean in those districts. Even better than special elections between 2020 and 2022. Also, we hear a lot about these general election polls for Biden v Trump that are over a year out and there is a lot of hand wringing over the 50/50 results right now, but if you look into past elections, the challenger always has a big lead over the incumbent in these polls over a year from the election, but then the incumbent pulls back up when their voters start paying attention. Can MAGA even get any more fired up than they are already? The fact that he’s only tied with Biden in those polls right now is a bad sign for him. Does any of this guarantee anything? Not at all, but it tells me not to spend the next 13+ months panicking. The right is definitely trying to force their manufactured narrative of reality on everyone, but the numbers do not show that it is having any effect at this point. They are preaching to the choir, and that choir is far smaller than they believe it is.
So this video isn’t new, in fact it’s a couple of weeks old, but I just now got around to watching it. It is 20 minutes long (so longer than most Legal Eagle videos) and it’s done by Scowl Owl, who isn’t as entertaining as the regular guy (though still informative and watchable). It talks about how Twitter reacted to a warrant from the DOJ requesting Trump’s information, how and why they resisted it, and what resulted.
The first half of the video is pretty dry, explaining the law in detail. It’s a law channel after all. But if you skip to the halfway point, pretty much right at 10 minutes, that’s when it starts getting juicy. This covers what happens when Twitter went back to the judge who signed the warrant and told them why they weren’t complying. I was highly entertained regarding the description of how Twitter’s lawyers dug a hole for themselves and kept going, until they were held in contempt. It’s not “Alex Jones’ lawyer accidentally giving the plaintiff all his info” good, but it’s pretty damn good. It helps illustrate how much of a fiasco Twitter is.
That would make me, literally, an ex-Twitter user.
This man is not well.
He claimed that forcing a small monthly payment will greatly reduce bots if each payment method must be unique. But why would that be the case, can’t a corporation buy many memberships? In any case, that’s the only reason Musk might do that…
We’re really witnessing the origin story of a Bond villain, aren’t we?
As I child I was also fascinated by the letter X, but this made me laugh. (This is a joke.)
Excerpt (WaPo): Things my toddler and Musk both do that are signs of genius, apparently:
- Is awake and asleep at surprising times
- Is thrilled by the mere existence of the letter X
- Demands that people give them their labor on holidays and be grateful to do it
- Is mad that Mars is not a place we can easily go
- Wants to be center of attention at all times
- Is excited by babies
- Is mad at gravity
- Gets furious that car needs to be driven and will not just magically go when they sit in it
I think this is an excerpt from the Isaacson biography:
That’s another thing we have to thank Elmo for. If not for him, I wouldn’t know that Grimes isn’t very smart. Apart from having to be pretty dumb to let your partner name your children X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, and Techno Mechanicus*, not even knowing the origin of the alleged meaning of your child’s name isn’t a good look.
Nobody tell her that the elves didn’t have a word for “Artificial Intelligence”. Or a language. Or exist. Elmo has apparently taken care of letting her know that she can’t remember the name of her favorite aircraft.
Although Musk later corrected his partner, saying it was actually “SR-71.”
*Am I the only one wonders if he really wanted to name their third spawn Adeptus Mechanicus but knows how sue happy Games Workshop is?
Hmm (from the Warhammer 40,000 wiki):
I just so curious how an aircraft that has “No weapons, no defenses, just speed” is “Great in battle”?
I’ve seen a number of righties, fascists, and Elmo stans who are in general bad at understanding satire or subtext and think that the Imperium in 40k is a glorious utopia keeping the light of civilization shining in the darkness, and not a failed state that’s been slowly decaying for thousands of years just like its skeletal emperor, comatose and strapped to a machine that can only slow down his inevitable death while he rots away, like its creators intended it to be. (Just do a Google image search and you can find plenty of fan-art of Elmo as the Emperor of Mankind.)
Wouldn’t surprise me the least if Elmo fancies himself that way as well.